The Washinton Color School was an art movement founded by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland that emerged in the late 1950s in Washington DC and flourished in the 1960s, promoting a form of abstract art developed from colour field painting
The Washington Color School was founded in response to the abstract expressionism of the New York school. An exhibition of their paintings in 1965 at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art cemented their reputation for creating paintings that disregarded structure for colour. Many of the artists used acrylic paint on raw canvas, which led to the description hard edge painting.
Artists associated with Washington color school include Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Alma Thomas.
The term colour field painting is applied to the work of abstract painters working in the 1950s and 1960s characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour
Post-painterly abstraction is a blanket term covering a range of new developments in abstract painting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, characterised by a more rigorous approach to abstraction
Acrylic paint is water-based fast-drying paint widely used by artists since the 1960s. It can be used thickly or thinly depending how much water is added to it
Abstract expressionism is the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterised by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity
Hard edge painting is an approach to abstract painting that became widespread in the 1960s and is characterized by areas of flat colour with sharp, clear (or ‘hard’) edges
The term New York school seems to have come into use in the 1940s to describe the radical art scene that emerged in New York after the Second World War
The British critic Lawrence Alloway (1926–1990) generated a new vocabulary for American art of the 1960s and 1970s. This paper discussed his use of such terms as ‘system’, ‘network’ and ‘art world’, which remain in the lexicon of contemporary art.
Acrylic emulsion paints have been widely used by artists since their development in the late 1950s. This paper reviews the conservation information that currently exists about them. Brief descriptions are given of their development and how they are analysed, but the focus of this review is on current conservation concerns about their physical properties, how they will age and the effects of cleaning.
Lawrence Alloway claimed that the art critic should avoid explicit value judgements and instead provide information. This paper historicises Alloway’s approach and examines his adoption of information theory. More broadly, it suggests that reconsideration of Alloway is pertinent to contemporary debates on the condition of art criticism.
